Shoring Up Foundations 167most deep-rooted, yet often quite reasonable presuppositions we make about the
character of our reality.
Rawls’ difficulties with metaphysics (particularly any notion that a liberal society or
liberal citizenship could be based upon metaphysics) are not only due to his incipient
Kantianism. As part of a powerful generation of post-1945 American intellectuals,
Rawls was subject, directly and indirectly, to a range of intellectual pressures. In
political science the hegemonic theories during this period were behaviouralism, elite
theories, and pluralism, forms of Marxism, rational choice and economistic accounts,
all tended to treat politics in an instrumental empirical manner. Metaphysics and
moral argument were viewed with deep scepticism, if not outright hostility. Empir-
ical facts had to be kept rigidly apart from ‘woolly metaphysical speculation’. Further,
in mainstream philosophy in the twentieth century the incipient Kantian mistrust of
metaphysics was unwittingly supported, not only by the early twentieth century waves
of denunciation in empiricism, naturalism, and realism, but closer to the 1950s, in
the strictures of logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, and analytic philosophy in
general. Rawls (and many of his acolytes), coming from the hybrid stable of polit-
ics and philosophy, could not help but reflect this general intellectual disquiet with
metaphysics. Perhaps, the fact that he assumes that many of his readership reflect that
same unease, that he, almost symbolically, distances ‘political’ from ‘metaphysical’
liberalism and believes that he does not have to explain what he means by metaphys-
ics. Metaphysics is simply wrong-headed. Yet, viewing metaphysics in a longer-term
philosophical framework, it is clear that there is nothing intrinsically that rules it out
of court, accept an over zealous and uncritical adherence to a particular, if dominant,
intellectual tradition.
Conclusion
What is the essence of political liberalism? In essence, it allows liberals to both coopt
and deflect communitarian criticism. It retains liberal scepticism over communit-
arian attempts to provide an alternative to liberal practices. On the other hand, it
takes on board the communitarian worries over the nature of morality and polit-
ical values. One crucial point here—which is, in fact, an issue raised by all forms of
conventionalism—concerns how we can bebothdeeply attached and situated, yet still
retain our independent critical faculties and the freedom to use them. If we are, to a
large degree, immersed within communal conventions, how can we retain our ability
to critically scrutinize communal conventions? Both Oakeshott and communitarians
have their own responses to this issue. Political liberalism provides another answer.
The gist of the political liberal case is that the basic conventional practices of liberal
democracy presuppose certain values, which are correct and right for us. Yet, these
values transcend particular communities. Thus, notions such as rational dialogue,
public reasoning, equal basic respect (and ideas of neutrality often engendered by such
concepts) are relatively commonplace over a number of states and juridical systems.
There is, as it were, a background expectation of the validity of these concepts across